Making Meaning, Creating Care: Mad Zines and Self-Harm

Last week I was in Paris attending the Narrative Matters conference, and there was a brief moment when I considered spending this entire blog giving readers a detailed ranking of the many baked goods I consumed, from butter-laden almond croissants to a deliciously flaky salmon quiche. But I have restrained myself, and instead am going to write about a brilliant talk, and about some questions it raised about narrative, sensemaking, and madness.

The conference started off strong as the very first panel I attended featured a talk from Prof Hel Spandler entitled ”Anti-Narratives Matter: Zines as Restorative Objects for Psychiatric Survivors”. The talk explored their work in the Wellcome Trust funded MadZines project, which “explores the potential of MadZines to challenge prevailing psychological, psychiatric and medical understandings, diagnoses and treatments”. Their talk discussed the complexity or difficulty of narrating experiences of madness or neurodivergence through traditional narrative modes, and the way that those of us who have lived these experiences might develop alternative chaos or ‘anti’-narratives. I was particularly moved by their exploration of zines as “seamful” rather than “seamless” – drawing on the work of Paula Cameron. This is partly about how the way that zines themselves draw attention to the process of zine-making – because that process is important, and because the process itself is often as much about the meaning of the zine as any content contained within.

Hel and their colleague Jill Anderson expand on the importance of process in a recently published article about “Mad Zine Pedagogy”, where they talk about zines as not just ‘being in process’ (i.e. there being no requirement for them to be complete or perfected), but also that they can act to ‘contain’ difficult thoughts and emotions, so they can be expressed, processed, or worked through. I was really drawn to this, because it echoed an argument I made in a paper published last month about care, creative texts, and self-harm. In it, I discuss a participant from my PhD research, Tracey, who talked to me about making zines when she was younger. She said that “writing poetry or making zines … in retrospect was about trying to have something beautiful and nice that didn’t feel at all like I felt”.

She talked about how one of the zines contained a poem by Edward Lacie-Smith that she felt was particularly connected to her self-harm as it “expressed something that was quite a beautiful and personal experience to me, and it did so in a way that wasn’t very obvious”. I think what she says really attests to the way that making a zine can allow us to engage with difficult experiences in ways that are meaningful or even pleasurable – in ways that I think seem caring. In the paper I bring her account together with descriptions from other participants of practices that bridge the textual and the material to create a feeling of care, such as attending poetry readings or re-watching scenes from TV shows. This is perhaps an unusual sort of ‘caring’ about self-harm – where rather than trying to avoid it, or decrease the space it takes up in our lives, my participants suggested that it was by engaging with the idea of self-harm, by spending time thinking about that experience, that it was possible to find care.

Hel’s talk also particularly resonated because I have recently been involved in publishing a zine about self-harm myself. As part of the CIC Make Space, together with my wonderful colleagues Courtney Sommer and Bathsheba Slater-Wells, and a range of fantastic co-facilitators, I recently ran a series of creative workshops for people who self-harm. When the workshops came to an end we invited participants to send us any work they’d created that they’d like to be included in a zine. The zine was designed by the extraordinary Lea Cooper, and working with them left no doubt in our minds about the care expressed at every moment through the zine-making process. We’re extraordinarily proud of the end result which brings together artwork, memes, and written reflections.

What I particularly like about it (in addition to how beautiful, funny, and moving it is), is unlike the ‘perzines’ or ‘personal zines’ which are often at the forefront of writing about Mad Zines, this is a collective zine. There are many authors, many artists, many voices. There is no narrative – or perhaps there are many narratives – or perhaps, as Hel suggested, there is an ‘anti-narrative’. I have long been interested in the way that experiences of self-harm might resist coherence, logic, and singularity – I think zines are a really powerful way of engaging with that. I love that you can move from one idea or experience to another, without having to make sense of them, or iron out any contradictions – another way that zines are ‘seamful’. I think contradictions are important – we should take care of them. Indeed, I wonder if this expresses another way that Mad Zines might be a form of care – that they enable care for contradiction, for incoherence, for impossibility, and most of all for multiplicity. I like that this zine (and other multi-authored self-harm zines like A Space for Self-Harm that I produced in collaboration with Self-Injury Support) allows those of us who have self-harmed to come together through time and space, in all our complexity and difference. I think we need more opportunities for that, however we find them.